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PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. PHP was originally an abbreviation of Personal Home Page, but it now stands for the recursive initialism PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter implemented as a module, a daemon or a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) executable. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP codewhich may be any type of data, such as generated HTML or binary image datawould form the whole or part of an HTTP response. Various web template systems, web content management systems, and web frameworks exist that can be employed to orchestrate or facilitate the generation of that response. Additionally, PHP can be used for many programming tasks outside the web context, such as standalone graphic

Performance Comparison of Middleware Architectures for Generating Dynamic Web Content

Emmanuel Cecchet, Sameh Mohamed Elnikety, Willy Zwaenepoel

On-line services are making increasing use of dynamically generated Web content. Serving dynamic content is more complex than serving static content. Besides a Web server, it typically involves a server-side application and a database to generate and store the dynamic content. A number of standard mechanisms have evolved to generate dynamic content. We evaluate three specific mechanisms in common use: PHP, Java servlets, and Enterprise Java Beans (EJB). These mechanisms represent three different architectures for generating dynamic content. PHP scripts are tied to the Web server and require writing explicit database queries. Java servlets execute in a different process from the Web server, allowing them to be located on a separate machine for better load balancing. The database queries are written explicitly, as in PHP, but in certain circumstances the Java synchronization primitives can be used to perform locking, reducing database lock contention and the amount of communication between servlets and the database. Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) provide several services and facilities. In particular, many of the database queries can be generated automatically. We measure the performance of these three architectures using two application benchmarks: an online bookstore and an auction site. These benchmarks represent common applications for dynamic content and stress different parts of a dynamic content Web server. The auction site stresses the server front-end, while the online bookstore stresses the server back-end. For all measurements, we use widely available open-source software (the Apache Web server, Tomcat servlet engine, JOnAS EJB server, and MySQL relational database). While Java servlets are less efficient than PHP, their ability to execute on a different machine from the Web server and their ability to perform synchronization leads to better performance when the front-end is the bottleneck or when there is database lock contention. EJB facilities and services come at the cost of lower performance than both PHP and Java servlets.

2003

Specification and Implementation of Dynamic Web Site Benchmarks

Emmanuel Cecchet, Sameh Mohamed Elnikety, Willy Zwaenepoel

The absence of benchmarks for Web sites with dynamic content has been a major impediment to research in this area. We describe three benchmarks for evaluating the performance of Web sites with dynamic content. The benchmarks model three common types of dynamic content Web sites with widely varying application characteristics: an online bookstore, an auction site, and a bulletin board. For the online bookstore, we use the TPCW specification. For the auction site and the bulletin board, we provide our own specification, modeled after ebay.com and slahdot.org, respectively. For each benchmark we describe the design of the database and the interactions provided by the Web server. We have implemented these three benchmarks with a variety of methods for building dynamic-content applications, including PHP, Java servlets and EJB (Enterprise Java Beans). In all cases, we use commonly used open-source software. We also provide a client emulator that allows a dynamic content Web server to be driven with various workloads. Our implementations are available freely from our Web site for other researchers to use. These benchmarks can be used for research in dynamic Web and application server design. In this paper, we provide one example of such possible use, namely discovering the bottlenecks for applications in a particular server configuration. Other possible uses include studies of clustering and caching for dynamic content, comparison of different application implementation methods, and studying the effect of different workload characteristics on the performance of servers. With these benchmarks we hope to provide a common reference point for studies in these areas.

2002

Performance Comparison of Middleware Architectures for Generating Dynamic Web Content

Emmanuel Cecchet, Sameh Mohamed Elnikety, Willy Zwaenepoel

2003